Rails Engineer

United States

Description

Howdy 👋We’re the folks at Jilt, an email marketing platform built for eCommerce. We help thousands of stores surprise and delight their customers with emails that drive sales. We’re looking for a driven, detail-oriented senior engineer to join our team and build fast, scalable backend systems in Rails.

The Role

You’ll work closely with your teammates on the engineering team to design, create, and refine systems that power the core platform; things like syncing data with external eCommerce platforms, optimizing our sending architecture & scheduler, and analyzing browsing & shopping behavior data. Jilt is built as a traditional Rails 5.2 app, with Postgres & Elasticsearch for persistence, and Sidekiq for background jobs. We use Angular (v1) to power our visual email editor and Vue.js for some areas with a lot of dynamic content, and are actively replacing both with React, so you’ll be able to help architect the APIs that will drive those new interfaces.

While the majority of your time will be spent working on backend systems & features, you’ll also have the opportunity to work on various front-end systems, like fixing a bug with our email editor, replacing a legacy Slim template with a React view, or adding a new feature to our storefront JS.

As one of our senior engineers, the team will look to you for advice and direction. You’ll help shape our best practices, decide on libraries & tooling, and refactor older or underperforming parts of the codebase. You’ll also be responsible for moving your projects forward, communicating your progress and milestones with others, and clearly documenting your work.

Here are some things you may do on a given day:

Research and write a pitch to improve the performance of our email scheduling system

Experience working on the front-end and excitement for combining front-end frameworks like React alongside Rails

Familiarity working with external APIs (have experience with eCommerce platforms? This is a bonus — tell us!)

You love writing code that’s clear, self-documenting (but you know that self-documenting doesn’t mean no comments), and standards-compliant. You prefer writing Ruby, but are comfortable in JavaScript or picking up other languages (like Go or PHP) as needed. You have deep experience working with Rails and all of its libraries and know when to roll a custom solution to a problem or use a gem. You’ve worked with Sidekiq or a similar background processing system, and understand the subtle but important guidelines to follow when architecting performant, fault-tolerant background workers.

You also love data and working with complex queries in SQL, whether as part of ActiveRecord or on the console. You have experience with Elasticsearch, or are excited to learn it, and are interested in the challenges involved with keeping separate datastores in sync. You love keeping up-to-date with the latest best practices and tools, and are constantly tweaking and improving the way you work. You know how to operate a hydraulic press, or least watched a YouTube video about them and think they’re totally rad.

You’re excited to solve engineering challenges in the most pragmatic way possible, and most importantly, you keep the end user in mind and love getting feedback from customers to help improve our products.

Finally, you can’t wait to join a small team that loves their work as much as you do, affords the opportunity to work on challenging & interesting projects, continuously learn and improve, and constantly ship your work. You’re an excellent writer and can communicate effectively whether drafting up a bug report, chatting in Slack, editing a wiki page, or drafting a retrospective. You know that code is about communication and explaining your thought process clearly goes hand-in-hand.

Our team is fully-remote and we communicate primarily through Slack, Clubhouse, Google Docs, Basecamp, and weekly stand-ups via Zoom (a few short meetings) — we believe the best work happens when given lots of uninterrupted time that’s free of distractions.

As a remote team, we believe that regular meetups are invaluable for getting to know each other better, so you should be available for 1-2 company-paid team trips per year. Curious about what those are like? Check out our recap of last year's team retreat (SkyTrip), which brought the entire team out to Lake Tahoe, California for a week. It’s a plus if you think (like we do) that bears are absolutely the coolest animals in the forest. 🐻

This is a full-time, salaried position, but hours are flexible. We know your work will speak for itself with commits, issues closed, and wiki edits.

PROCESS

After an initial screening, you’ll get an email with a few questions to answer. Following that, you’ll have a few 45 minute phone chats with different people on our team to learn more about you and answer any questions you have about the position and company.

The most qualified candidates will then be invited to complete a short one-day research project. If this goes well, we'll invite you to the final stage of our evaluation process: the trial project. During this ~2 week period, you'll work closely with your future manager, as well as a few other team members, as a paid contractor to implement your proposal from the research project. You'll be welcomed in Slack, introduced to any team members you may be working with, and will have regular chats with your future manager to share feedback and make sure all is going well. Already working full time? Don't worry! We design the trial project assuming someone already has a full time job. We won't ask you to work crazy hours, and we keep your project scoped accordingly. This brief trial period is a great way for you to make sure you enjoy the work and the team, and it also gives us an opportunity to do the same. At the end of the period, assuming a great experience for all, you'll be offered a full time position 🎉Then the real fun and full onboarding experience will begin! 😄

Benefits

Here are some benefits we're happy to offer to our team members:

- Competitive salary

- 27 days of paid time-off, in addition to 2 company holidays (SkyVerge Day in March, Founders Day in June 😀)

- Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for US and Canadian residents and their families (reimbursements for comparable care for non-US/Canadian residents)

SkyVerge
does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.